For Alison Murdock, the work of cultural intelligence is a bit like being a selective host: “We’re sort of like the door people standing in front of a club, going: ‘That’s interesting. Maybe that’s not so interesting,’” she says. “We are definitely the ambassadors. And we’re doing it all over the world.”
Cultural intelligence is now more important than ever, says Murdock, chief executive officer of 1021 Creative. The cultural intelligence company works with companies including YouTube and Amazon to understand fandoms and communities and help brands engage audiences in culturally-relevant ways around the world.
“We have people embedded in the culture, living there, looking for cultural hits and trends in the location that they’re based. So it gives us non-obvious insights that most companies or agencies can’t really get,” says Murdock. “We’re really helping companies understand fandom, understand community, understand audiences, and how to engage audiences in ways that are culturally relevant to them.”
1021 has been around for 11 years, and has seen both the importance of culture and the intelligence-gathering change with the evolution of technologies and platforms. But the work has gained great importance recently, as the creator economy emerges and brands struggle to keep up with faster-moving trends that emerge from new sources and are increasingly atomized into subcultures, Murdock explains.
Cultural fluency has never been more important, because the worlds of entertainment, marketing, advertising and the creator economy are all “just simply exploding,” she says.
“Trends and cultural nuances are moving very quickly and being adopted and celebrated in countries where that may not have happened 20 years ago. We also have the platforms, as well as the people to celebrate those trends, to bring them to life,” Murdock says.
She notes the impact of the film “K-Pop Demon Hunters” is a great example of an unexpected global phenomenon that spawned a wide and diverse subculture driven by fans.
“No one saw how fast that would move, and truly it did,” she says. “It’s not only that, but there are all these offshoots and pieces around fandom that have come to life as a result of that movie.”
Many marketers claim they move at the speed of culture, but that’s easier said than done, says Murdock. “A lot of what we track as ‘culture’ is already over. By the time a trend makes it into a brief, the people who started it have moved on. We’re who you want pressure-testing whether being ‘early’ is actually being late,” she says.
Especially today, as more brands seek to bring more of their operations in-house, they have to consider cultural intelligence as separate practice. Marketers know they need it, but “they just don’t know if they can grasp it fast enough,” says Murdock.
Marketers need help collecting real-time trend information and understanding the origin and direction of cultural trends. Most importantly, they need to gauge if the brand belongs in that conversation. “Bolt-on” attempts at cultural relevance can be worse than doing nothing at all, Murdock says.
“Unless you have people on the ground where that culture originated, where that trend originated, it’s very possible that you don’t completely understand it. You don’t understand the origin of it. You may not understand if it’s something that’s a moment or a movement in culture,” says Murdock.
A moment versus a movement
The distinction between moment and movement lies in how they affect the culture. Movements involve shifts in consumer behavior, Murdock explains.
“The movement itself is that underlying tendency to associate with something that feels like it’s a phenomenon, whereas a moment might be a little tiny blip in that trajectory,” she says.
One example is the emergence of microdramas as a media genre built specifically for mobile devices. The content may be the moment – short episodes mean to be watched on the move, shot on vertical aspect meant to be screened on a phone – but the movement is a change in media consumption and platforms enabled by technology, she explains.
“Hollywood is changing dramatically because of these types of things,” says Murdock.
Nuance matters, says Murdock. Size, reach and engagement are not the same thing when discussing cultural movements. Even a global phenomenon like the FIFA World Cup is made up of many moments and subcultures, she explains.
Microcultures are increasingly important in fandom, says Murdock. Marketers need to understand those narrower cultural segments to be able to engage that fandom effectively.
“We believe innovation happens on the edges and microcultures are outcroppings of communities, or at least central to a specific audience,” she says. “You have to dig a little deeper. You have to really understand the way that people are influenced day-to-day.”
For example, Korean beauty products are in demand with a segment of consumers, but the brands and products that tourists will bring back from their trips and make popular back home may not be the same ones that women in Seoul buy for themselves, says Murdock. A local observer would catch that nuance.
This is why it’s important to be embedded in those cultures, Murdock says. She notes 1021 has a network of local experts around the world that digest media and signals “putting the tidbits that they identify together as a story.”
“You can feel the grassroots movement,” she says. “But it isn’t until you have other people saying: ‘Yes, I’m seeing this as well,’ that allows you to calibrate the insight that you’ve perceived.”
Cultural relevance is admittedly intangible, but it can still be data-driven, says Murdock. 1021 engages in audience mapping and uses proprietary research to identify white space and nuances in culture to help brands navigate them.
Social listening or qualitative data then need to be interpreted and put in context. Do the data underpin the cultural signals we’re seeing? says Murdock. “We’re a support system to the insights teams and brands looking for guidance.”
Technology enables social listening and qualitative data that can then be validated by other means, says Murdock. She explains it can be as simple as reading metadata and curating content and cultural information to interpret that data.
